The Fighter (14 page)

Mick was a knockabout guy, Peter will say years later. He made a buck whatever way he could, and he grabbed his chances. He was born in Tassie, but raised in Richmond. A city boy. He walked out of home at sixteen, back in the 1920s.

He wanted to be free of the paternal yoke. He wanted to test himself. He left the big smoke and made his way hundreds of kilometres north to Moama, on the banks of the Murray. He joined the gangs constructing railway tracks, and lived with his fellow workers in tent cities.

The tents followed the tracks, dismantled and re-pegged as the line moved onwards. Mick grew tougher; his muscles hardened. His face took on the lines and creases that would mature with his sharp angular features into a weathered handsomeness.

He returned to the family home five years later. Elegantly dressed, independent in spirit. Lobbed back, just like that. ‘I'm home,' he says, as if he'd left the house that morning. ‘Let's get on with it.'

He worked at odd jobs, did stints in factories, and briefly joined his dad in his scissor-sharpening business. ‘There's a long family history in this,' says Peter. ‘You can trace it back to the Reads in Ireland. I guess it was in the genes to work with steel and keep the edges sharpened.'

Mick worked on the hand-propelled grinding wheel. He turned it while his father ran the blades over the surface. Sparks rebounded off their protective goggles. Mick still yearned for
independence, and he broke away to set up his own business. He did the lot—picked up the orders, sharpened, hopped onto the pushbike and returned the scissors to the barbers and tailors who were his clients.

He became so strong on the bike he turned professional, and earned enough points one year to be judged the Fitzroy Cycling Club champion. At anything physical, Mick was a natural.

The business expanded. He took in the scissors of textile factories. ‘All the big ones,' says Peter. ‘You name them, Mick did the sharpening: Yakka, Julius Marlow, Fletcher Jones, the Commonwealth clothing factory, which had over a thousand machines, with two scissors allotted to each machinist.' Mick had so many orders he couldn't keep up with them. He progressed from bicycle to motorbike for the pick-ups and deliveries.

For a time he rented a store in Hardware Lane in the city. Barbers would drop in for a chat. But they took up too much of his time, so Mick closed the shop and went back to working from home. He had little time for idle chatter. As the business grew, he took out a lease on the two-storey house in Amess Street. He set up the workshop at the rear of the house, accessed via the side entrance.

There are parts of the story best not dwelt on: a wife, two children, a son and daughter. Peter was born in 1938. The marriage broke down when Peter was four. His grandmother looked after him until he was eight. When she died, he moved back with Mick. And that's how it stayed, father and son, Mick and Peter.

Mick got on with it. ‘That's what you do. Work. Seize your chances.' He rented one of the upstairs rooms to a baccarat
school. The room was big enough to accommodate a good few players around the card tables, and as a bonus there was enough space for a game of two-up.

Gambling was good business. Mick set himself up as an SP bookie in the back lane, and had his son keep a look out. Young Peter stood on the steps by the lane entrance where he had a clear view of Canning and Amess Streets, and he perfected the art of appearing nonchalant.

The gamblers congregated by the wall round the back of the house, behind the gym. They milled about, eyes fixed on newspaper racing guides. Exchanging tips, vouching for their insights, and bragging about inside information. They were in it as much for the company as for the dreams of quick riches.

The odds were rung through by a contact who obtained them from a secret place in town—somewhere opposite the Queen Vic Hospital—then travelled a circuitous route to Mick's back lane. Mick listed the prices, collected the bets, and marked them on a sheet of paper.

He handed them up to Freddy ‘the Pencilman', through the toilet window. Mick removed the louvres before each session, and the Pencilman sat on a chair that stood on a table straddling the toilet bowl. Freddy scribbled the names and bets in a notebook, and he kept an eye on the proceedings, his head framed by the window.

At the slightest sign something might be up, Peter rang a bell attached to the door against which he was leaning. Within seconds the toilet window was shut, the cash hidden and the lane emptied. Peter received two and sixpence for his troubles.

When the gamblers were sprung, the police went through the motions: token arrests, a fine, or half-hearted warnings. A cut of the take and that was it, the cops were happy. They let them be. The gambling restarted and the lists of names in the Pencilman's notebook grew longer.

Mick made enough money in one five-week streak to buy the two-storey terrace outright. He upgraded from a Crown station wagon to a brand-new cream-and-gold Ford '56 Custom-line. Peter was delegated to wash it. He wiped down the seats and kept the duco polished.

But the sharpening business remained the main game. Passed down from father to son, it was a dependable way to make a living.

Never one for a backward step, Mick took to importing shears and scissors from the US, Mexico and Germany, and from the home of steel, Sheffield, and selling them to retailers and wholesalers. The rooms and passages at 166 Amess Street were stacked with cartons.

No matter how busy things got, Mick looked after Peter. The boy did the cooking: rump steak and salads, the occasional topside. He did the cleaning and looked after his dad's cars with the loving care of a strapper attending prize racehorses.

At fifteen, Peter took up wrestling. He did eighteen months of one-armed combat at Weber and Rice's gym in Bourke Street, before moving on to the Victorian Railways Institute's gym in Flinders Street. He won a state junior title. Then he switched to boxing. He was a strong kid. Mick took on his training when Peter declared he intended to enter a golden gloves tournament.

Mick trained him in the upstairs room, and then he converted the garage into a gym. He had done a bit of boxing but had never competed. So what? He went around to the gyms, observed the trainers, and put himself through a few punches.

He was a quick learner and he understood what counted: relentless training, day after day, and fast punching—if you can't punch fast, you can't punch hard, can't have one without the other. And above all a fierce desire to win. Willpower. Mick's regime was good enough for his son to win the state amateur middleweight title in his third fight and, in the following year, at eighteen, good enough to earn him a place in the 1956 Melbourne Olympics.

In his first Olympic bout, he drew the undefeated Puerto Rican, Jose Torres, a seasoned veteran. Peter would get mauled, predicted the experts. True to expectations, Torres floored him in the first minute, with a savage right to the back of the head, a curving haymaker. Peter didn't see it coming. He crashed face first onto the deck. He hauled himself up and buried his head in Torres' chest, and kept it glued there till the bell saved him.

Between rounds he listened intently to his trainer's instructions. He had one of the best: Ambrose Palmer. ‘Stay close to him,' Ambrose said. ‘Nullify his reach. Go under his punches.' Peter returned to the ring a different fighter. He stepped up close and ducked under Torres' punches, then stepped back out of the range of the superior reach and firepower. He remained an elusive target.

He lost the fight but, by the end, there wasn't much in it. Peter was a champ in the making, said the pundits. He was quick
on the uptake. The experience he gained from each fight was a springboard for the next one.

He turned pro at twenty-one, and within two years he was the state middleweight pro champion. He won the bulk of his fights with a clear knockout. He loved nothing better than cleaning up an opponent with a haymaker. Ah, to take them out with that one crisp punch made life worth living.

He won the Australian middleweight title on his second attempt. He had learnt his lesson. One lapse in concentration and you were gone. As a five-foot-six middleweight he usually faced taller opponents. But what he lacked in height and reach, he made up for in speed and stamina; and he loved the training, and loved tracking his progress.

He weighed himself before each session and after it. He celebrated each pound shed. He took pleasure in being lean and light. He ran the Princes Park–cemetery circuit each morning, and relished his increasing fitness. And he went at it toe-to-toe with his father.

The two of them in the gym, father and son slugging it out, boxing each other ragged. Full-blooded body punches. No holding back. Breath echoing breath: to a rhythm marked by the thud of glove and the thwack of leather. Two men in harness: a kind of loving, a fierce competing.

No giving ground. No compromise. Pressure training. Five, six rounds at breakneck intensity, quality over quantity. Timing over blind punching. Old Mick was protected by body shields: a sheet of masonite between the chest and singlet, and a thick upper-body vest that took the edge off the punches. When that
was over, Peter pounded a medicine ball held against Mick's chest, and then a cowhide bag stuffed tight with clothes.

There were some in the boxing fraternity who dismissed Peter as a backyard chancer, trained by an outsider. The Reads were proving them wrong. Father and son were united in their desire to triumph. Winning was what it was about, and intimate one-on-one training was the foundation.

Peter loved it. The routine. The habit. Climbing those final three steps to the ring and slipping through the ropes, high on the anticipation. He longed for the clean knockout. That's what the patrons were there for, that moment when it all breaks loose. This is what keeps the punters coming, he says, to this day, the chance of seeing a fighter out for the count—the knockout blow: a moment of raw beauty, a carnal elegance.

Peter won his final fight in Auckland. He took the points in every round, and was poised for a rapid rise. His fortunes were on the up. His most recent fight was his best to date. He had taken it to a higher level. The Commonwealth belt was within reach and, with that, the possibility of even greater glories.

He didn't see it coming. That's how it always is, he says. He shrugs, purses his lips. It still rankles. He was sharpening a guillotine. A sliver of steel flew up and lodged in his right eye, sharp as a scorpion sting. The pain was agony. Real pain, he says. You don't know it until you have it.

That was it. Peter retired. He put the accident behind him, and transitioned from boxer to trainer. He took on the Nissen twins eight months later. Peter and Mick didn't charge a fee.
They trained the boys for the love of it, and for the rekindled dream of victories. If a kid turned pro and won a fight, the Reads got twenty-five per cent of the take, to cover expenses.

They took on just a handful of boys, the ones they figured had what it took. And they put to the test their tried method: pre-dawn runs, then back to the Reads' backyard gym and their personal one-on-one attention.

Peter's wife Merle was part of it. She greeted the boys with a hug and fed them, and bought them their boxing boots when they couldn't afford them. She looked after them when they stayed over. Practical love, maternal affection. A mother's touch returned to the terraced house after decades of absence.

So it progressed, day after day, year after year, life lived by the Read ethos. Don't look back. What good can come of it? Make light of it. Dismiss thoughts that can bring you down. Keep your wits about you, and hang on in the clinches. Don't be afraid of getting hurt. Hit back. Fend for yourself, and you'll never be short of a quid.

It was the family credo. Practised by the father, passed to the son, and on to their charges. Take care of business. Hone the blades razor sharp. Open up new outlets. Return to the gym after work and give instructions. A punch is coming at you? Keep your balance. Duck and feint, bob and parry. Be alert. Keep moving. Gargle between rounds; spit out the water. One errant thought and you're done for. Have faith in your hours of training. Keep them guessing. Be a dancer.

*

Old Mick was a dancer. He never remarried, but there was always a lady friend to escort to a ballroom. He knew them all: the Lonely Hearts Club, the Trocadero, the Ziegfeld Palais, and the Victoria Racing Institute Ballroom above Flinders Street Station.

He loved making an entrance. The old man had style. He kept himself lean and his posture upright. In his sixties he retained his sharp angular features, a rugged, sculpted face, and an ample head of hair, combed back in a cresting wave as it had been since he was a teenager.

And he dressed grand. He owned seven suits. He had sought out reputable tailors to make them up for him: smart modish jackets with three-and-a-half-inch lapels, no skimping. The continental look, custom made for ease of movement. He took time deciding which suit was right for each particular occasion.

Tonight he goes for the white tuxedo with a black tie, a white shirt and silver cuff links. His shoes are perfectly polished. His hair is slicked back with Californian Poppy. He loves the fit of the trousers. He runs his hand over the fine wool. He appreciates what good tailoring can provide: the feel of the jacket slipping on effortlessly. Just one slight shrug of the shoulders and it sits perfectly.

In dancing he is as methodical as he is in all things athletic. He took it up in earnest in his sixties. He had lessons. He was a natural, but he knew the value of technique, and of expert training. He did not dance the Pride of Erin or the circular waltz—they're too effeminate for his liking. He loved slow fox trots, the quickstep, cha-chas, tangos and rumbas, and the modern waltz, his favourite.

Like boxing, dancing demands deft footwork, and a sense of timing. The ballroom is an arena, the dancers the contenders, and Mick is a fierce competitor. He has retained the hunger. Dancing is a test of physical prowess. It's both pastime and contest.